Transitions are difficult, as the world is discovering right now. The former focus on sin and salvation has given way in emphasis to further revealing of the universe, and science is now coming into its own as a source of new insights for a new age. While it may be challenging to let go of previous modes of operating as a church or a spiritual movement, we find deep truths emerging today in many fields which must be incorporated into any realistic and comprehensive future for religion itself.
As women have become more involved in the academic and scientific world, a general picture is emerging of the differences between a man’s perspective and woman’s perspective. I remember my boss asking 20 years ago, “but what is women’s science?” I couldn’t tell him back then, but now I would be able to reply, based upon reading and observation, that women see things from a more holistic perspective, they often think more in pictures, more intuitively, and take in the whole of a situation at once. Men tend to think in a more linear fashion, work out truths sequentially, and build up a worldview according to this method.
As a means for freeing people’s minds from the domination of the church in the early days of Western European science, the more male-oriented methods worked well, cutting out an ever-expanding corner of truth that held its own in rational circles, and gradually taking over as the predominant worldview in the West. However, its own success has brought us to a day when it is not unusual to find accomplished scientists asking if maybe science has simply tied itself up in its own strings. With uncountable solutions to the currently popular string theory (a highly theoretical mathematical scheme that regards a one-dimensional string as the most fundamental building block of matter), and no way to distinguish between these solutions, this has to be a valid question.
Even in the West, certainly since the early days of quantum physics and relativity, there has been a secondary track within science, based on the idea that matter itself is in some sense conscious, or at least has some kind of internal nature. Alfred North Whitehead, Henry Stapp, Rupert Sheldrake come to mind as scientists who have been willing to investigate paths that have challenged orthodoxy in many ways.
Newtonian science presented matter as inert, purposeless small billiard-ball type pieces moved around at random by a similarly purposeless array of forces. The universe was deterministic; even humans were simply living within this scheme of purposeless and meaningless activity.
This perspective is long gone, replaced by various developments of the 20th century, such as quantum physics and chaos theory, and today certainly superseded by theories that resonate with molecular biology and epigenetics (a biological theory, confirmed by experiment, that our life experiences affect the expression of our genes, replacing the old view that genes essentially controlled everything).
Of greatest significance today is the emergence of a worldview that recognizes the internal nature of matter itself, because that deeply resonates with the natural intuition of most women, and indeed the femininity within men. Most of the world easily accepts that consciousness preceded the material world, and can accept that at the basis of all matter is some aspect of consciousness. It is not a new concept that the universe was created with a purpose, and that every aspect of reality has meaning and spiritual significance.
Throughout the last century, most scientists accepted the common view that consciousness emerged as a byproduct of the organization of matter, according to the action of universal laws. Today this is brought into question, and seeing the incredible coincidences that would have been necessary to bring about a universe so perfectly designed for the emergence of life, more and more hardcore scientists suggest that such a universe simply had to be in some way designed for this. Science has been driven to the extreme of positing the existence of an infinite array of universes, a multiverse, in order to avoid having to recognize meaning behind the uniqueness of the physical world. If there are infinite worlds in existence, the reasoning goes, then it is not so unusual that we would find one in which life can evolve.
Our current impasse in science certainly allows the possibility that all existence emerges from a universal consciousness. Mathematically we might propose an infinite dimensional, although undifferentiated, universal field, giving rise through a process of narrowing down into a finite dimensional reality to a material world. For a spiritual person, this consciousness would of course be identified with the mind of God, but there is no need to impose such a thought on everyone.
And there is good reason for that last sentence. If at the very core of our being we exist within the consciousness of universal divinity itself, when we start to look within, that is what we are going to find.
Prior to this time in history, looking within was likely to find a great deal of chaos and what was formerly understood as sin. Now, however, as the feminine perspective grows worldwide, when we look within we find more pain and urgent need for love, built upon a strong philosophical core of acceptance of universal oneness and universal good. Our younger generation embodies this: their inherent goodness and deep search for spiritual truth, along with their often ruthless rejection of our guidelines for how to actually be good.
If human beings emerge from within the consciousness of God, however, and we find deep pain and loneliness within, then that is likely to reflect the real situation of God, both the feminine and the masculine aspects of God. The long, tormented history of restoration in which people judged each other, committed violence upon each other, and sought to dominate by physical force cannot possibly have been what God was expecting when She created the world within Her own being. Never being able to cut off from what was happening, God went through the most terrible of tortures along with everyone in history.
Restoration required gradual shaping of humans through truth and religion (which sometimes managed to manifest truth) and this is why the masculine nature of God was so necessarily dominant. But today we are beyond such a time, so that we no longer need to be dominated by laws and religious doctrines.
In fact, it is a time when Heavenly Mother Herself can reach directly into the world and into our hearts and begin to live in our relationships of love. It is a time when we can start to look within and discover that we are, in fact, divine, although not yet mature, beings. The search for truth on the part of our young people can be our greatest liberation as long as we support rather than judge them.
The basis for oneness then is not our beliefs so much as our very identity. Our challenge right now is simply to know ourselves as manifestations of the one God. Religious differences are nothing compared to this self-knowing. Religious teachings of course are often helpful, but once we know our identity and trust that knowing, we can allow our real selves to emerge without hiding or fear, knowing our deepest core is much stronger than our psychological shell.
While consciousness is at the core of our own being, it is also at the core of every being, even every elementary particle, planet and star. Elementary particles may not reflect on the higher mathematics of their choices, but there are scientific voices now calling for a new model of the actions of elementary particles as due to choice, as part of their seeking relationship in order to allow the emergence of life. Women and men in physics and the philosophy of science are suggesting we have been too quick to identify the mathematical time parameter within relativity with the psychological time of our human experience, and of course there would be no reason to accept the “twin paradox” of relativity if the material world truly existed within consciousness instead of the other way round.
Other scientists are beginning to explore the possibility that the laws of science emerged within evolution, rather than driving evolution. After all, it is hard to reconcile the pre-existence of eternal laws with the emergence out of nothing of a universe obliged to follow these laws. We are at a turning point in our understanding of the universe just as we reach a turning point in our spiritual self-knowledge.
No one can dictate to a divine being. Authoritarianism is not such a relevant course today for that reason. If we discover a desire to still obey someone outside of ourselves, it might be appropriate to ask if we may be just trying to avoid self-knowledge and the process of self-exploration. Obedience is appropriate for a time period to learn from someone and inherit their wisdom, but not as a permanent state of being. Relationships can manifest the masculine and feminine within God, and that balance has seen significant change in its expression on earth, facilitating a much greater expression of original consciousness as a result of our spiritual growth and evolution.
Suddenly the idea of simply following received doctrine is no longer generally valued in the same way, and we find ourselves searching for a new Prime Directive, one that can unite, not divide. The emergence from within one consciousness shows us the oneness at our very core. So while we are in search mode, we can retain the confidence in knowing that fundamentally we are still brothers and sisters no matter what cracks appear on the surface.
Let’s be kind, patient and respectful of each other’s search. The universe itself urges us to take that path.♦
